New integration to brokers

Background

Linking broker accounts is a key element in the functionality of kinfo. Since the beginning, multiple different solutions have been tested and switched out for various reasons. Starting with Intuit who acquired Mint a shut down their API soon after to almost all other players in the market, Yodlee, Quovo & Tradeit.

A new solution with Plaid

For over a year Quovo has been the primary solution to link brokers with kinfo. Last year Quovo was acquired by Plaid.

Plaid has a long history of providing solutions for account aggregation, though they have mainly focused on savings accounts, categorization of spending etc. Quovo, on the other hand, has focused its offering on investment accounts only.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense since there are a lot of synergies between their businesses and there are many parts of the technical implementation that are similar but their customer base differs.

What to expect

Plaid is a much bigger company which means the existing Quovo organization will get access to a larger organization for engineering, support, and maintenance of the technical platform. Despite the hassle of migrating to a new solution, this is positive in the long term and will provide a solid solution for broker integration which is at the heart of the platform and necessary to calculate trading performance metrics.

I expect to see better broker support and faster response to problems related to broker linking and data.

Improvements to Robinhood integration

Quovo never supported Robinhood, so in order to enable support for Robinhood, this integration was going through another aggregation provided, Tradeit. Sadly, this integration never worked very well, accounts would continuously get delinked for no reason and there was an overwhelming amount of errors in the data.

The new Plaid integration supports Robinhood so I have high hopes that this integration will work much better than previously.

Support for Tradestation

Plaid doesn´t fully support Tradestation. Prior to the migration we have conducted tests to see what works and sadly the Plaid support team gave up on supporting Futures via Tradestation and are planning to remove support for Tradestation completely.

Support for Tradestation via Tradeit

While Tradit failed on integrating Robinhood, they managed to create a solid integration to Tradestation using their official API which should provide the best possible data quality.

I know that many users of Tradestation trade futures which adds another layer of complexity with many underlying exchanges, inconsistent symbol naming, contracts and multipliers for different contract types.

I always wanted to support Tradestation since they provide a great platform and we have many successful traders using TradeStation. Quite a few TradeStation users rely on algorithmic trading for their success which I think is a very interesting approach.

Using the new broker integration

Both the web version and the mobile apps are updated to use the new broker integration. Just click settings -> broker integration on the web or through the menu in the apps.

When you link using the new integration all previous links and related data will be removed. 

Help us improve

The new integration to brokers is new and tested with a couple of brokers such as TD Ameritrade, Interactive Broker, and Tradestation, though new things always tend to have some errors that are hard to foresee. If you experience any problems email support [at] kinfo.com and we will have a look at it.

It´s been a lot of focus on fixing problems with the broker integration lately, though I hope that 2020 allow more focus on improving the platform with new features and adaptations based on user feedback. I would love to hear from you about feedback & suggestions. Send me an email to karl [at] kinfo.com.